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Headlines before the start of the 2015-2016 school year announced that Sausalito Marin City School District, in one of the most wealthy counties in the U.S., became the first in the nation to serve exclusively organic and non-GMO meals. On August 27th, 2015, students at the district’s two schools, Bayside MLK Jr. Academy in Marin City and Willow Creek Academy in Sausalito, dined on all organic lunches launching the first district-wide school year in the nation to dish up a side of food myths with meals. Judi Shils, the founder of non-profit education and advocacy group Turning Green and director of The Conscious Kitchen (TCK), which implemented the program and quotes a $10,000 consulting price tag for schools adopting the protocol, says “it’s been an enormous success.”

A label on a bag of popcorn carries a seal of approval from the Non-GMO project, one of The Conscious Kitchen's partners. ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images

I spoke with Shils, who expressed enthusiasm and caring for children and the environment, to gauge the first half of the school year. The district’s meal program, framed around fresh, local, organic, seasonal, and non-GMO ingredients, or "FLOSN," aims to improve kids’ health and educate them about food, agriculture and the environment. Each school has its own chef who prepares food on-site, with initial salaries reportedly covered by donations, which aren't factored into the $1.70 to $2.10 cost-per-meal Shils quoted during our conversation.

The self-described “non-GMO in the biggest way there is” mom doesn’t only pride herself on nourishing children’s bodies, but also their minds. “We teach it forward” she explains.

Referring to FLOSN, Shils says that the curriculum accompanying the food program aims to teach kids and parents “a lot of the really good words.” Her dream is to make FLOSN food, which she deems “the best food that exists on the planet,” the norm for families across the country and even the world. Reality reveals a different story.

Let’s start with the "non-GMO" N in FLOSN. A scientifically arbitrary term, Genetically-Modified Organism has come to denote crops created with modern molecular genetic engineering. "GMO," which applies to diverse techniques and products, from crops engineered with an insecticidal protein that prevents boring insect damage and resulting carcinogenic mycotoxin contamination, to non-browning, non-bruising Arctic apples, bred with a gene silencing technique, is an unscientific and arbitrary acronym. Indeed, the vast majority of the foods we consume have had their genomes altered in the field or in a lab.

As I’ve discussed several times, including here and here, genetic modification, also known as genetic engineering or more broadly, biotechnology, refers to a set of processes, not a product.

As a group of scientist and science advocate moms (including me), known as the “#Moms4GMOs” wrote in a 2015 open letter to anti-GMO celebrities:

Genetic engineering is simply another plant breeding tool. It results in a targeted genetic change or adds one or a few carefully chosen genes to a plant. The technology may sound scary, but genes actually transfer naturally between species. Genetic engineering has been used for decades to make life-saving medicines including insulin. Hundreds of studies show that the process used to create GMOs, and the GM products currently on the market are safe, and scientific bodies around the world agree.

“GMOs (genetically modified organisms) have yet to be deemed safe for humans or the environment,” states The Conscious Kitchen’s website. Perhaps the Sausalito-based school meal program relies on blogs and common anti-GMO tropes rather than the hundreds of studies (about half of which aren’t industry-funded), along with leading scientific bodies around the world, which agree that genetic engineering processes and resulting products are no less safe or environmentally friendly than their counterparts.

A common misconception, the idea that local and seasonal is better for the environment, economy and health seems plausible. After all, minimizing “food miles” and supporting your small local farmer rather than purchasing produce from miles or even states away just “makes sense,” doesn't it?

When considering the full lifecycle of our food, it turns out that energy use and emissions during production tend to be higher, about 83% of an average American household’s food consumption carbon footprint, than resources expended during transport. Consider that a fruit or vegetable grown in a local greenhouse requires energy to maintain ideal temperature and growing conditions and that small farms are often less efficient than larger farms.

How about the F in FLOSN, which stands for "fresh"? “Food tastes best and has the highest nutritional value when it travels straight from farm to fork,” TCK’s website declares, explaining that it avoids frozen foods and preservatives. Conveniently, the organization doesn’t cite any sources to corroborate its commitment to the F-word.